Prehistoric Love Song
by Jstar-and-Astar
Summary: She knows the anomalies. She has spent her whole life among them. She's got nothing, no one to live for. And then she meets the boy, oh, a beautiful boy. M to be safe. R&R!
1. Prologue

Anomalies look like broken glass.

Anyone who's seen one knows it. It's like seeing a shattered window, frozen in time, the fragments exploding outwards and hanging suspended. Though what you see with anomalies is not shards of glass; it's the bits of space and time, torn apart.

Helen Cutter thinks she knows everything about these things. Anyone could tell, the way she brazenly dashes through the cracks, as though she's so sure of where she's going to end up.

She knows nothing.

None of them do.

Stephen, Connor, Abby, Nick, Claudia. Each of them has no idea what these things really are. What they do.

How foolish, these humans. How oblivious they are. They have no idea how precious their existence is, how fragile. They are all willing to throw it away at a moment's notice.

They don't know that they are throwing away this blood and breath and beauty. Kissing in the rain and in the dark and in the fog. Screwing in bars and public bathrooms and the woods. Tasting the sea and the sky and the air. Running and crying and laughing and living; they don't know what it is to give it up.

Fools for beauty, these humans.

Connor stares at Abby stares at Stephen stares at Helen stares at Nick stares at Claudia stares at . . . ?

It's all like a twisted game, a poem, a cats' cradle. And it can be even more complicated, depending on how it's looked at. But the gist is the same. There's love and hate on both sides of this tale. And really, what is sexuality when you spend your time with the same group of people?

But very few of them ever say anything about this.

Although Abby looks at Stephen, eyes the well-defined muscles of his arms, the lean breadth of his shoulders, and wonders what it would be like to kiss him. Claudia looks at Nick, and wonders how he ended up with a woman like Helen. Helen looks at Stephen and smiles a feline smile, raking her eyes over his body and remembering what it was like to strip off his pants and throw him onto her mattress, slicing her fingernails into his flesh and biting his lower lip. Nick looks at Claudia, and remembers the warm press of lips. Connor looks at Abby and remembers her in her underwear, twirling around her apartment to a loopy song. Stephen looks at Abby and thinks about her mile-long legs, wrapped around his waist. Claudia looks at Stephen, and before she can help herself, notes that he is immensely attractive. Connor looks at Stephen, and shamefully imagines those hands, the ones he has seen holding a gun, wrestling a dodo, sweeping through bloodstains, he imagines those hands on his chest, on his waist, and he blushes. Stephen looks at Nick, and remembers Nick touching his cheek in tunnels, when Stephen was dying of the poison, and he shudders at the thought of how warm those hands were, how gentle. Nick looks at Stephen, and even though he knows it's wrong, he thinks about kissing his assistant, about pinning his hips down flat on the desk and kissing him everywhere. It's even more complicated now that there's a new woman on the team, and Nick knows who she is but she doesn't. He watches Jenny and remembers Claudia's lips on his.

And nobody does a thing.

Except for Helen, of course, who takes what she wants with no regard to the consequence. She laughs when she remembers Stephen, who seemed so strong, begging her pathetically as she moved her hands over him. She remembers this with a cruel twist of her lips. But as of now, Stephen is out of her reach. She could, of course, just crawl into his bedroom and tear his clothes off, but she's sure that he's say _no, _and rape is not what she has in mind for tonight.

The music is nearly a palpable thing, pounding, thudding, pulsing. Helen's eyes sweep the writhing crowd of dancers, searching, searching. And then—yes!—she sees it. She sees who she's looking for. The woman who stands perfectly still, head cocked slightly to one side.

The woman whose eyes are the same pale, glittering silver as an anomaly.

Helen smiles and makes her way over. The woman—no, she is closer to girl than woman—watches her with wary acceptance. She has to have known that this would happen, that Helen would find her.

Still grinning, Helen reaches forward and snags the girl by the shoulder, pressing her lips to her ear. "Make a sound and you die."

The girl is unresisting as Helen drags her out of the club and into the icy night air, down the street and into the house that Helen knows is empty. The girl watches her, flatly, although when Helen touches her impossibly beautiful body, she feels taut muscle, tensed by adrenaline.

_She _is beautiful, this girl, shockingly so. Her features are impossibly perfect and her shining eyes are enough to make any man (or woman, for that matter) stop in their tracks. Now, those brilliant eyes are narrowed.

"I can't help you," she tells Helen. "I already gave it away." Her eyes flash. "I have nothing for you."

Helen smirks and pulls at the neckline of the girl's shirt, drawing it down over her collarbones. "Oh, I think you do." The girl closes her eyes as Helen kisses her, as they fall onto the bed and move over each other, a writhing tangle of limbs. Helen's no lesbian, not even bisexual, but this girl is stunning, anyone would admit.

In the morning, Helen slips on her clothes and vanishes, leaving the girl to rake together her hair, black and shining as a raven's wing, and to step slowly into the sunlight, the memory of the night before still heavy in her limbs. She is tired of being used by people like Helen Cutter, tired of people feeling the need to own her skin, at least for a night. And Helen has left her a souvenir: three symbols, unerringly even, on the inside of her right thigh.

They throb, oozing blood, as she limps down the street, unclear as to where she is going, only knowing where she is going, only knowing that she is headed for trouble.

Anomaly turns her shimmering eyes to the lightening sky, remembering a man who told her that the sky was where the dead are, watching.

"I can't," she tells it, feeling the warm sting of blood on her leg. "I can't," she tells the dead, although really, she isn't sure what she can't do.

And as she hears the growl and turns, as the faces the beast with a knife that is barely big enough to hurt it, the dead are Anomaly's only witnesses.

They are the only ones that watch her fall into a blood haze, her vision filling with crimson red, the only ones that feel sorrow, as she knows with a certainty that she will die.

"_They should have named me Sorrow," _she rasps, as the blood takes her, as the darkness rushes in and consumes her.


	2. Lacerated

_You are locked within my heart_

_You and me, you and me_

By the second beer, Stephen had stopped watching the instant replay in his mind of Nick's hand patting his thigh and had started imagining undressing the woman next to him.

He was no lightweight; he wasn't really drunk yet. But still, his mind wandered to the curves of her body.

She smiled at him, and seductively stood, swaying her hips and turning to grin at him, an invitation. He attempted to focus on this, but his mind inadvertently wandered to Nick, to Nick's gentle yet callused fingers brushing his cheek.

He considered sleeping with this woman, just to get it out of his system, but the guilt sent him out into the night, on an absent-minded walk through the forest.

Stephen knew it was a bad idea; anomalies and such, but some intuition sent him wandering among the trees.

He was about to turn and head back when he found the corpse.

It was another Gorgonopsid, lying on a knot of tree roots, a knife buried hilt deep into its left eye.

Cautiously, Stephen stepped toward it, but it was clearly very dead. His head was spinning. Was there another anomaly? It was the knife that stilled him. Who managed to kill a Gorgonopsid with nothing but a knife, and a very short one at that? But there was a trail of blood across the forest floor. Stephen swept a finger through it and pressed it to his tongue. Human blood.

So he followed it.

What he found shocked him.

A black-haired young woman lay beneath a tree, bleeding from many wounds and frightfully still. She was very thin, and dressed all in black, her leather boots slick and shining with red, red blood.

Slowly, he stepped towards her, although he could make out no sign of life. But when his foot came down hard on a leaf, and she moved, very slightly. He froze as her chest heaved once, and he made a move to get to her, to help her, to do something, but her right hand came into view. In it, she clutched another knife.

Anomaly came to consciousness at the sound. Someone was walking across the leaves: they crunched softly. Wincing, she pulled out her knife, and manage to open her eyes, a slit.

There was a boy, oh, a beautiful boy in front of her, and she had seen beauty but never like this. Her own people were beautiful but this boy, oh, this boy—this man—he looked at her with a gentle compassion in his blue eyes, mixed with shock, as he saw her awaken.

"Stay away." The girl's voice was garbled, and her eyelids were so low that they were nearly closed, but the knife, light glimmering along the thread of its blade, was clearly not a joke. Although, her hand was shaking, and even with the knife, Stephen was fairly confident that he could win a fight with someone nearly unconscious with blood loss.

"You need help," Stephen said softly, making his way closer and closer.

The girl shook her head, blearily. "No."

"You're dying."

"Dead anyway," she rasped, and then, sheathing the knife, flipped herself over and doggedly struggled to drag herself away.

"No; let me help you, all right?" He moved closer, and she yanked herself along.

"The only favor you could do me is to put me out of my misery," she snarled in response, and then moaned slightly, clenching her hand and gritting her teeth, finally fully opening those eyes.

They were silver, a soft, soft silver so pale it was nearly transparent. The color of an anomaly, he realized abruptly.

"Please," he said, and touched her shoulder. "Let me help."

She glared for a moment, and then the life slid out of her. "Alright."

Gently, he pulled her closer, awkwardly sweeping his hands beneath her and lifting her, curled against his chest. "I'm Stephen," he said, an afterthought. "Stephen Hart."

Anomaly wasn't sure what to tell this boy, this Stephen Stephen Hart. _A human name, quick. Anomaly is just not normal. _Something came to her then, and she opened her mouth, her voice a weak croak.

"My name's Andie."

Stephen nodded and adjusted her in his arms before making his way towards the edge of the trees. "I'll take you to the hospital, okay?"

She shook her head and jerked slightly. "No hospital."

"But—"

"No!" At this she twisted in his arms, and he shifted his grip on her body.

"Okay, okay. At least let me take you to the ARC."

Her eyes narrowed. "ARC?"

"Um . . . it's where I work. We have a medic."

"No."

"You're bleeding."

She leaned away, towards the darkness. "I have medical supplies in my bag." Now that he looked, he could see a backpack nestled beneath the tree roots, which he heaved over one shoulder and moved to carry Andie around the dead Gorgonopsid. She made a soft sound, and Stephen reached out to pull the knife out of the Gorgonopsid's eye with a wet _squelch_. Gingerly he handed it to Andie, who took it with a slurred murmur of thanks in a voice that was, to his horror, growing weaker.

Suddenly terrified, Stephen sped up, nearly sprinting until he reached his car, the passenger seat of which he carefully put Andie, before he rushed around to the driver's seat and gunned the engine before he's even gotten his seatbelt on.

A rusty sound escaped Andie, one he feared at first was a death rattle, but quickly revealed itself to be a laugh as she looked up at him with a weak, wavering smile.

"What?"

She shook her head blearily. "I'm getting blood on your seats."

Unexpectedly, a smile jerked at Stephen's mouth. "Fuck the seats."

Her head lolled back against the headrest, and Stephen's stomach lurched. "Andie, Andie stay awake!"

One eye opened a slit. "Don't worry Stephen Hart. I have no intention of dying on your watch."

"You better not."

His apartment building came into view, and praising some unknown deity, he plucked Andie up and rushed inside, fumbling with his keys and swearing when he nearly dropped them. But somehow, he got Andie inside.

Her bag clunked to the floor, forgotten, as Stephen banged into the kitchen and dumped her down on the table, doing his best to be gentle, although panic quickened his movements. _Why are you so freaked out? _He asked himself as he bustled around. _All you know about her is that she can kill a Gorgonopsid. _

But still, that didn't keep him from ripping open packages of disinfectant, from soaking towels and cleaning out her wounds, from delicately bandaging her injuries and coaxing swallows of water down her throat. Under his ministrations, she slowly began to respond, to be able to tie her own bandages and help him get her clothes off. But when he moved to slide her pants down, her hand clamped viselike onto his wrist.

"Look, you need to just let me—" Andie shoved at him, and he was about to let out a sound of protest when he saw the fear, stark and frantic, in her eyes. He gentled his voice. "I'm just going to look at your wounds, okay? I won't . . ." Won't what?

She stared at him, warily, before slumping and pulling her pants down over her body, revealing her lacerated legs. The cuts were relatively small, although the worst of them was a series of parallel gashes that slashed across her ankle, scissoring through skin and muscle. But what surprised him were the cuts on her inner thigh—frighteningly deliberate markings, too straight and even to have been made by anything but a knife. Most were symbols he didn't recognize, but beneath them; a pair of initials, ones that made his blood run hot: _H.C. _Helen Cutter.

"How did you get these?"

She narrowed her eyes. "I had an unfortunate sexual encounter," she said quietly.

The blood pounding in Stephen's ears made it hard to think. "Would it perhaps have been with a woman who calls herself Helen?"

Andie's mouth twitched at the corner. "You are shockingly well-informed, my dear Stephen Hart. Have you experience with her?"

"Yes," Stephen said curtly, and daubed peroxide on her cuts. "She did this to you?"

Andie's mouth went flat. "I knew she wanted something, and I told her I didn't have it." She trembled. "It turns out I did have something she wanted."

Stephen touched her arm, looked into those eerie silver eyes. "I'm sorry."

She smiled wryly. "I'm used to people using me, Stephen. It doesn't matter anymore."

"Of course it matters, she hurt—"

Andie leaned forward and covered his mouth. Her skin was warm, feverishly so. It almost seemed to burn him. "It doesn't matter."

She held his gaze for a moment, those eyes glistening in the dim light. And then she jerked away, and that moment was over. "Well. I appreciate the help, but I should probably get going." She made a move as if to stand, and then almost immediately started to crumple.

Stephen grabbed her before she hit the floor. "You can't go like this. Stay the night." She watched him through narrowed eyes.

"Fine. I'll sleep on the couch."

Stephen shook his head. "You can have the bed. I'll sleep on the couch."

Something strange flickered in her eyes then. But, "Thank you, Stephen," was all she said.


End file.
